At one time, decision-making by Bureaucracy and Committees was considered a weakness and failing of large corporate institutions -- a negative, to be succinct. I guess it's different when you're a Committee member. Or, maybe its just another reality that Google has changed (yes, I'm being sarcastic).
This writer, being a member of such a process and committee, is unsurprisingly very self-congratulatory about how it works, and seems quite enamored of himself and his committee-mates. "And then I told this really clever joke, and we all laughed....".
I'm not learning much here except that Google has achieved a Cult following within its ranks. I say that in congratulation to Google - they're doing it better than M$ did in the 1980s.
Ha! I made the candidate so nervous he peed in his pants! No way were we going to hire him after that!
I don't think I was particularly harsh. Just wanted to see what it would take to make them cry. Because that's exactly the kind of people we are looking for at Google. Because it mirrors the work environment so well!
I know the author IRL and he's one of the nicest people I know. He's also incredibly whip-smart and, I suspect, the reason why it's so unnerving interviewing with him is that he can surgically hone in on your exact areas of weakness and gaps in your knowledge.
People who have survived all these years on pretty lines of bullshit and puffed up records will find the interview process harrowing. People who are smart, humble & enthusiastic should do fine.
I think that shows that the author may be a poor interviewer (at least on a first glance).
It is the job of the interviewer to make the interviewee to feel at ease, and relaxed as much as possible.
Some people get very nervous in interviews, and panic a bit, and some of them can be very good engineers.
It seems the author's "surgically honing", is more of a "look at me, I know more than you do", ego stroking type of thing.
Since I do interview people often (not google, but another top company on the valley), I make sure to make people at ease.
When I was younger and stupid, my first instinct was to find the interviewee weakness and 'hone' on them.
Looking back, that was plain stupid. It helped me make myself feel good than actually do any good to the process. I gained later on some insight on my behavior once I was on the other side. Since then I made sure to be really really fair and unbiased on the questions I ask. You need to find both strengths and weaknesses of a candidate, but make sure not to trigger a panic induced 'coder's block'. Otherwise you failed as a interviewer.
Are you his equal or better? Assholes are kiss up, kick down people. I'm not suggesting he is because I don't know him, but giving people shit on the grounds that they're less capable isn't endearing.
I agree. No matter how 'nice' someone else claims this guy to be, if he was trying to make someone cry because they didn't know something during the interview, makes him a prick.
That is is plain and simple bullying -- no better than a physically stronger kid beating all the weaker ones on the playground. The playground here is the interview process and he is the bully.
I'm sure he is a great person -- in no way should my characterization of his interview style be construed as a knock against his entire person. But his interview style stinks.
(It is important to weed through people that just know buzzwords and get to the meat, but this kind of interview style is not really acceptable IMO. You should be able to know if somebody actually goes deeper than buzzwords in a 5-10 minute, casual conversation in the cafeteria over a cup of coffee.)
He talks about 5 interviews a week like that's some crazy number, try 5 a day for a while.
Someday, he's going to be interviewed by one of the people he turned away (at least he should approach it like that).
Two things. First, it seems that the HC has thus far been doing a pretty good job selecting candidates. People seem very happy with how Google is doing overall, and it's widely thought that the engineers there are on the whole fairly good at their jobs. Maybe things would be better if decisions could be made by individuals throughout the company. But it also seems like this could lead to more bad apples, and eventually to organizations full of them, like the MSN org at Microsoft. Being on a committee makes it psychologically easier to reject candidates, which is probably a desired effect.
Also, who do you propose might make the decision if not a committee? Managers certainly can't be allowed to, at least not unilaterally, because they have all kinds of conflicts of interest that might encourage them to hire subpar people.
I don't think "committees are universally bad" is a widely held view. For example, almost all companies are led, ultimately, by a committee (a board). They have their uses. Maybe hiring is one of them.
Now, about cult followings. One of the guys in that story, Bogdan, is famous for terse denials of various sorts of requests that might be sent his way (e.g. for more bandwidth, for a certain service in a datacenter, etc.). This was true to the extent that for a long time googlers on the kernel team maintained an extension at /proc/bogdan. When cat'd, it would print things like:
I don't think "committees are universally bad" is a widely held view. For example, almost all companies are led, ultimately, by a committee (a board). They have their uses. Maybe hiring is one of them.
False. The board has the power to fire the CEO. They do not have the power to "lead" the company.
The executive board is led by a single person (the CEO) and that one person makes all the ultimate decisions, except for those which he delegates to his or her executive team.
Committees are pretty much universally bad. Their main purpose is diffusion of responsibility and inflation of work. I'm not saying this specific committee didn't work - there are always exceptions - but most committees are disastrously bad at getting anything done.
Committees are good for one thing: making sure that risky decisions aren't made. In some cases that can be good - for example, in some cases (eg: safety committees) risky == bad.
Note: Obviously, in some cases risky == good, too
Note 2: Group-think (eg, bay-of-pigs) is a counter example.
This Bogdan guy sounds a lot like Paul the Prophet: "I remember a guy who worked as a mainframe tech for a bank back in the late '60s who went by the name "Paul the Prophet," and had a dyed-green mustache. He was the only employee of that bank other than janitors and loading dock people who didn't wear a tie to work, but he had unique skills his bosses needed, so they put up with him."
As with all committees, Google's hiring committees seem to fail at one important metric: speed.
I know a lot of smart kids who didn't end up at Google because it took them two or three months to hear back about their interview results and by the time they had already accepted another offer.
I like erring on the side of caution and tough interviews, but there has to be a faster way of doing that. At companies where a manager is hiring for her team, once she has found a good candidate she will want to hire them quickly. There is a sense of urgency. It seems to me that one side effect of not having hiring managers is that this sense of urgency is lost and so no one is really motivated to push for getting back to individual candidates on time.
Speed is important, but it takes a good part of a year for a new engineer to get up to speed. Compared to that, an extra week (which is what the HC introduces) for better selection is worth it.
The real question is whether you get better selection overall by taking more time. The HC may improve decision making on Google's side, but if the lag gets too long you'll start losing people to other offers. And the people most likely to get other offers are probably strongly correlated with those you would eventually choose to hire.
I agree that quality takes precedence over speed, any day. Having said that, I would like to make the following points:
1) From the experience of close friends, it is not an extra week. It is typically at least an extra month. Some times it's even longer.
2) It is not clear to me whether the extra time is being spent on improving the selection or simply being wasted because everyone on the committee has other things to do which introduces delay in reaching quorum+agreement.As an outsider there is no way for me to tell one way or the other, but it's something for Google to think about.
3) Humans hate uncertainty, especially in important life decisions. Many people, given a choice between an uncertain prospect of getting a job at Google and a certain job at a company that is slightly worse than Google, will choose certainty. And there are many companies who are not obviously worse than Google competing for the top talent.
1. Extra interviews required. This has nothing to do with the HC. In many cases, interviewers themselves screwed up here, and told the HC so. The alternative would have been "no-hire."
2. Candidate got redirected to a different department. This resets the hiring clock. This is unfortunate, but the alternative would have been a straight "no-hire."
3. HC too over-committed. I wrote a bit about this in my book and won't go into it here. It's not an easy problem, and Google's scaling problems came into play here.
Reed Hastings makes a case that as a company grows, hiring standards should go up: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664. I agree, and if the consequences is that you have a harder time making a quick decision and have to lose some otherwise good candidates, I think the quick decision is the greater of the two evils.
This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait. Bear in mind that many candidates aren't really waiting: they already have a job and an extra month of latency won't reduce their interests. My brother worked at Intel while applying to Google. It took us 3 months to hire him. While it wasn't fun for him, it also wasn't costly either. (And yes, he took the job)
This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait.
This is the key reason it works for Google. I really like Google's products and hope that y'all continue doing the kind of work that has made this true. If you falter, this will stop working.
I had a standing offer from Google that I passed on, because I was busy doing other stuff. When I decided it was to move on I contacted my Google recruiter amongst other connections. Google didn't reinterview me, I was just extended an offer.
This process was slower than the entire interview loop at the company I am currently at.
So the really smart people find a job in the meantime, the not as smart are DOA for the interviewers/committees. I've always suspected the majority of engineers actually got in together with a business Google had acquired rather than being hired directly. At least it looks much easier.
While of course there are limits to how fast you can get back to candidates, you should know that from "we'd like to schedule a first-round interview" to "we do/don't have a position for you", Microsoft is about 5 times faster than you, and Amazon is about 15 times faster. That's the case for or internships, anyway, to which my experience is limited. I've heard it's pretty much the same story for full time positions.
When I interviewed with Google it was under 2 months from first contact until they sent me an offer letter. I have not interviewed with either MS or Amazon, but I'm quite sure neither one hires senior engineers in a week.
This whole thread is anecdotal, but they are still interesting anecdotes, so here goes. Here's my experience with these companies:
Microsoft: Interviewed with them for an Internship. Very organized, on campus recruiting followed by a fly up and an offer a couple months after the job fair where I submitted my resume.
Amazon: Interviewed for a full time job. I went through two rounds of interviews with one team in under two weeks from submitting my resume; they said my domain-knowledge wasn't a good fit for that team but another team was interested. About two months passed before any follow-up on that, but once that did happen I had three rounds of interviews with that team and an offer within three weeks.
Google: Interviewed with them for an internship. Gave my resume to them. Did not hear anything for about 2 months. Then I got a notification that they wanted to schedule the first round of an interview. Great. Another two months pass, no updates. I get another offer and let them know they have only a few weeks to decide.
Near the end of that few weeks, they call to schedule a phone interview for the following day. Based on one hour-long phonecall with a manager who asked pretty much just basic screener questions, they give me an offer later that day. At that point, for all they knew I could have been someone who could barely code! Granted, this was for an internship so the downside risk to Google was much lower: the internship would have essentially been an expensive three-month interview.
Interestingly, Google and Microsoft did not even consider my resume for full-time positions. The Microsoft recruiter even handed my resume back to me at a recruitment fair, which is the only time I've ever seen that happen! The reason was I did not have a Bachelors degree because I had left to do a startup. When my startup folded, I thought that the experience that had left me would allow me to find something at any of the major big companies (where I could save cash and get ready my next startup), and fortunately Amazon did see this as a positive while Google and MS were hung up on the degree.
A week for a local candidate wasn't unusual when I worked at Amazon (AWS was hiring a lot). After leaving I ended up looking around and got offers from both Google and Microsoft. Google was at least 4x slower and was generally frustrating (took them a month to get back to me after the phone screen). I ended up in a startup. Several people I know had the same experience.
I've heard Google doesn't assign new hires to a team right away, so the hiring process might just be a big talent search, where teams then interview newly acquired talent for a position on their team, after they are in-house.
I can verify, anecdotally. A friend of mine got a full time offer from Google a couple months ago and accepted right away. He's been told won't find out his team until just before starting in June (or July?).
These things change dramatically over time, and as you can imagine, mitigating circumstances and experience can make one candidate's experience vastly different from another's.
One thing I'd like to remind everyone about is that I'm writing about a time long gone. Trying to guess what Google today does based on what Google did 5-6 years ago brings to mind the adage: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
These days there are multiple levels of hiring committee, plus comp, plus Page. Sure some parts are "automatic" but they add useless weeks onto a slow bureaucracy meanwhile goog loses great candidates to companies which move faster. Sure there's a luxury of being the "best place to work" but the cream of the crop are the least willing to wait.
I've heard that engineers work on a starter project for the first few months. The starter project is often assigned a few days before the new hire arrives.
"Lucas's feedback for the candidate started with, "I spent the first five minutes of my interview calming the candidate down after his interview with Piaw..." When the others got to this part of the feedback there was a lot of laughter. I think that was the moment I realized that Bogdan and I would get along, because he high-fived me across the table."
You're a douchebag. I don't think I'm breaking HN etiquette, because I would have no problem saying it to the guy's face.
I would say that most Googlers would genuinely prefer that the candidate succeed. And Google has interview training that is supposed to help the interviewer put the candidate at ease, and get a fair result.
But as you say, it's human nature.
People who are defensive about their Googlerhood, or just lazy about interviewing, usually ask unfair questions. Ridiculous 'aha' puzzlers, for example. And my personal pet peeve, asking the candidate to solve a problem that you just solved a couple of days ago (perhaps after several days of collaboration and research).
> And my personal pet peeve, asking the candidate to solve a problem that you just solved a couple of days ago (perhaps after several days of collaboration and research).
I think these types of questions lead to some of the best discussions between interviewer and interviewee. The interviewee should realize that they aren't expected to just pull a perfect solution right out of thin air -- instead the point is to have a dialogue with the interviewer so that the interviewer can see how you think and communicate. And having a couple of big hard problems that the interviewee doesn't have enough information for an immediate solution is a good approach: you can see what kinds of questions the interviewee asks, how he tries to attack it, and the interviewer can provide information and nudges along the way, having all the background information fresh in his head.
In my reading of interview feedback, too many interviewers don't understand that the candidate shouldn't be expected to pull a perfrect solution right out of the air.
Often too much criticism is feedback is placed on the fact that the candidate went through three or so iterations and too much emphasis is placed upon the fact that the candidate's initial solution was quadratic or worse. This really should reflect strong analytical thinking.
I suppose that could happen in the best circumstance.
But in my experience, there are two things wrong with the "here's a problem I solved last week" question:
- the scenario is way too specific. Say you have some unusually pathological database that was developed in house, and you need to query it using a proprietary wire format that only your company uses. And you discover some kind of trick that sort of works. This is a TERRIBLE question to ask a candidate, but I've seen it done. The candidate is fighting in the dark, trying to grasp the outlines of the problem, for the full ten minutes.
- asking about stuff you did last week leads to the interviewer comparing themselves with the interviewee. A fair-minded person can see there might be other approaches. Most people are proud of their own solutions though, and won't accept alternative answers. It's better, psychologically, to use a problem you aren't personally invested in.
I'm reading Homicide by David Simon right now (yes, Simon also created a tv show by the same name). The banter of the homicide detectives is a clear example of this, too. It's just one way we (by which I mean humans) cope when faced with constant, high stress situations.
I have, and unlike the previous poster, I appreciated how short it was. I'm so used to books packing in a lot of fluff to appear fatter and better value for money. This book is thin but it's dense with information.
As I'm in Google's hiring process right now, it was interesting to read this story.
It does make me a little nervous though, as I'd really like to work there but it seems the chance of rejection is really high and I didn't get the impression that I did exceptionally well on the interviews.
I've heard it said (and experienced myself) that the hiring system at Google is designed to favor false negatives in order to reduce the risk of false positives. I know of plenty of cases where the first (and sometimes even second) trip through the hiring machine at Google rejected someone who now is happily employed there.
Go to Stanford or MIT. I know that may sound flippant, but my understanding is that Google really does have a very strong preference for hiring from big-name schools.
I checked your LinkedIn profile and it appears you:
* Live in the Bay area
* Graduated from Carnegie Mellon
* Specialize in C++
* Have an open source portfolio
* Have mobile development experience
Looks like you're low hanging fruit as far as Google recruiters are concerned - it's surely worth their time to call/email you every so often just in case your situation has changed.
I too have been getting pinged by google recruiters from LinkedIn about once a quarter. I ignore them. I'm highly annoyed by what I consider to be bullshit interview questions, it's likely I'll never interview there.
I agree with you there. They have an annoying habit of contacting ideal candidates with years or even decades of real world experience, and asking them idiotic administrivia questions that I could find the answer to in 30 seconds with access to a search engine, yet probably don't have memorized unless you happen to have a photographic memory and memorized every RFC.
What do you consider "bullshit interview questions"? In my interview I didn't get any of the "how many pennies would fit in the pockets of all the window washers in Seattle"-type questions.
This writer, being a member of such a process and committee, is unsurprisingly very self-congratulatory about how it works, and seems quite enamored of himself and his committee-mates. "And then I told this really clever joke, and we all laughed....".
I'm not learning much here except that Google has achieved a Cult following within its ranks. I say that in congratulation to Google - they're doing it better than M$ did in the 1980s.